[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Today, I found out my father is dead.
Well, not today. I wrote that sentence almost six years ago, and I still think about the way I found out my father had died. In true Boolean fashion, as I did from time to time, I entered my father’s name into a database. Whether I was playing fast and loose with Google or searching through the nooks and crannies of the extensive database of my previous employer, LexisNexis, I can’t recall.
What I do recall is that I came across an article from a Westchester newspaper citing the importance of working telephones for city bus drivers. Why would bus drivers need phones (in a pre-cell phone era, I guess) and what had this to do with my father? Because one November day around 1:30 p.m., a man was discovered on a city bus with no pulse. He was rushed to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival at 2:34 p.m., the cause of death, a heart attack. The deceased shared my father’s name, age, and had even widowed a woman with the same name as my father’s second wife.
It was him.
The information was so shocking that I don’t remember the details of what I did after I read that exactly, but the unceremonious facts of his death stick with me.
This deserves some context. I hadn’t seen my father since I was twelve or thirteen years old, at his mother’s funeral. Like so many weekend fathers, since my parents had been divorced, he simply faded from my life. He moved around New York City a lot, so I never knew exactly where he was. Without my grandmother, I had no address where I knew I would always be able to reach him. After we parted, he got married, but I didn’t receive an announcement or invitation. I suppose I had always been on the periphery of my father s life, and when my grandmother died, our link was severed.
Fatherhood and Broken Memories
I wasn’t sad so much over the loss of his life. I was sad because, like so many black women of my generation, I grew up never really knowing my father.
Our family photos and our family events are full of strong black women. Women just like me grew up knowing if we wanted something done, we should go to our mothers, or grandmothers, or aunts. Fathers, in my experience, were shadowy figures who turned up from time to time. I remember my father coming by on occasion. One time was particularly memorable because he had chauffeured a limousine he brought by. By some measures, I was lucky to see my father that often during those early years. Some of my friends saw their fathers once a month, once a year, or only at funerals.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about fathers, others and mine. Not because it’s near Father’s Day (it isn’t), or because the ubiquitous mommy blogs I surf have suddenly been replaced by a surfeit of daddy blogs. Fatherhood has just been on my mind.
This month I cried for the first time in years because I was able to witness one of the best displays of fatherhood I have seen in a long time. One of my acquaintances, on the heels of ending an abusive marriage, met a man who really cared for her. Despite the fact that she already had a child, he married her and took in her daughter as his own. He is the only father the girl has ever known. When she became old enough to realize he was not her biological father, she continually asked for only one gift – that he adopt her. So he did.
He made the ultimate commitment and adopted her. Last week, the entire family appeared before a judge, and her adoption became final. What had already been a reality became legally binding. The girl, now eight, was happy to have the same last name as her sister and her new father. The mother was likewise moved that her husband would make the ultimate commitment to her daughter. I became unglued when he took out “his girls” for a celebratory dinner.
During my life I’ve watched the fatherhood pendulum swing both ways.
I have friends whose relationships with their fathers, I envy. I still remember years ago when a friend of mine had a barbecue, and her father drove several hours to pick up specially marinated meat and bring it to her house. Now we know that only a man with completely single-minded determination would spend an entire day getting beef. I can only imagine the love of a man who thinks — ah, my daughter needs beef — and dedicates his entire day to the pursuit. Now, the beef was good, but it’s that kind of relationship I envy.
Another friend recently moved back to her hometown, Los Angeles, from years in New York City. After she purchased her first house, her father immediately came over to make necessary repairs. He’s there when her car breaks down, even if only to take her to the mechanic. And he’s there when she’s sick.
Regretting What I Am Missing
Then there are the fathers who’ve cheated, the fathers who’ve disappeared. The fathers who pretend their very flesh and blood children aren’t theirs when it’s convenient. The fathers who’ve done things egregious enough to land themselves in jail, leaving their children bereft and ashamed.
Then there is my own husband, who just became a father this year. He has taken to it almost effortlessly. When I asked him, during one of those whispered, middle-of-the- night conversations parents of babies have, did he feel like a father yet, he answered sleepily that how he felt didn’t matter – he was a father.
Though I know my own father was around during my earliest years, I don’t remember much of him then. As I watch my husband toss my son in the air, or turn him upside down, or tickle him mercilessly, I marvel at how the early bonds of relationships form and how my earliest bonds were broken.
For years, I hadn’t really given the father-child relationship much credence. I didn’t have a dad who was really there, but I had a mother, a grandmother, a family, and I graduated, got married, and didn’t get pregnant as a teenager. I assumed I was okay. It’s only now that I watch my husband and son, and the other good fathers around me, that I realize what I have missed, and what I am now missing. For the first time, I realize that I’m genuinely missing something because of the long absence of my father. It’s intangible, but there is no denying it.
If there’s only one Christmas wish that I’d have for my son, it would be that he have the love of his father for as long as he can.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
